Solar economy of the debt-image (blockchain edition)

This paper recasts the contemporary explosion of NFTs (Non-fungible tokens) – an application of blockchain technology and their attendant cryptocurrencies to produce an artificial economic scarcity for digital images – in terms of photography’s equivalency to currency, from its first articulation by Oliver Wendell Holmes’ in 1859 to Peter Szendy’s recent formulation of the ‘debt-image’ (2019). Focussing on the graphics processing unit (GPU) as the hardware nexus of the escalating currency of photorealism and the material realism of mining cryptocurrencies, the paper proposes to frame the vast energy demands of blockchain technology in relation to photography’s solar debt, and NFTs as a planetary potlatch within a Bataillean general economy.